photo courtesy of Frank at Chromewaves - check out his photos from the day here and review here. Thanks Frank!

Greetings from the Birthplace of Rock n’ Roll. I’m here in Cleveland on a bit of a holiday and thought I’d take this bit of downtime to do a quick post.

After months of build up the Wolfe Island Music Fest did not dissapoint. The day was great from start to finish – for which I have to extend my thanks to Virginia and all the volunteers. You did an amazing job putting it together.

Far and away I was most excitied about seeing Wolf Parade and I wasn’t let down. Although they did not play some of their “hits” that you might expect or want them to play, we were treated to a whole wack of new material. They somehow found the time between sideprojects over the last ten months to write a bunch of new tunes which, according to the band, were played for the first time to an audience here. The new songs were really good, although perhaps need to be roadtested a bit more. Elements of Sunset Rubdown and, especially, Handsome Furs have crept in, but melded with the WP sound to great effect. With about half the set being filled with new material, they played only six songs off “Apologies to the Queen Mary” which were very impressive live. I would have loved for them to play “I’m A Runner…” but at the end of the day I can’t complain about their setlist.

I’m posting the six previously released songs below along with a new one which Dan called the best song Wolf Parade has ever written. There has been a bit of debate on the Wolf Parade forum whether he was being sarcastic or not – I don’t think he was. I’m going to reserve my final judgement until I hear a studio-version of it but it is pretty damn good, if not the best. And, at the bottom, is a link to the full show. I wasn’t planning to post the full thing here at this point in time but since someone took it from the link I placed on the message board and posted it on their blog before I could post anything here, I figured I might as well put the link here as well.

A note about the quality – while (I think) it is highly listenable it isn’t the best ever. My levels weren’t set as they should have so it is a bit rumbly in places. Also, there is a fair bit of crowd chatter at times which couldn’t be avoided. Other than that I hope you enjoy it.

Wolf Parade, Wolfe Island Music Fest, 11 August 2007

* It’s A Curse

* Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts

* Shine a Light

* We Built Another World

* Fine Young Cannibals (new!)

* I’ll Believe in Anything

* Fancy Claps (encore)

Full set. Note – it is a big file and some people have reported errors with the first link. Someone re-uploaded it to a different hosting service so you might have better luck with that. Both links are below so take your pick.

Full Set on Gigasize 

Full Set on MegaUpload

Buy Wolf Parade’s cds. I swear it will make you a better person.